An American-origin F/A-18 fighter jet of the Kuwait Air Force, and not Patriot surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) as initially believed, had taken out the three F-15E Strike Eagles in a friendly fire incident in Kuwaiti airspace on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported.
A Kuwaiti /A-18 fighter jet was the cause of the accidental shootdown of three American F-15s on Monday, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
According to a US official, the pilot of the F-18 Hornet mistakenly launched three missiles towards the three US jets, which went down over Kuwait. It is very likely that the Kuwaiti pilot didn’t follow the correct IFF procedure or turn on the IFF transponder.
The incident was the first loss of an American aircraft since Operation Epic Fury began on February 28 with a massive wave of American and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, which has retaliated with missiles and drones against Kuwait and countries across the Gulf after its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was assassinated in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on Saturday.
Three US fighter jets, all of them F-15E Strike Eagles, were mistakenly downed in Kuwait – not Iran – by friendly Kuwaiti fire on Monday, according to the US military. The crews parachuted to safety.
The F-15E downing is the second known incident of US fighters being taken out by friendly fire in the Middle East in the past 15 months.
The Wall Street Report says that the ‘blue-on-blue’ incident occurred as multiple Iranian drones were penetrating Kuwaiti airspace. One of these impacted a base that resulted in the death of six Americans.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) said the incident occurred during “active combat,” which included “attacks from Iranian aircraft, ballistic missiles, and drones”.
Visuals shared online showed an F-15 spiralling down in slow motion, with flames from its rear. The plane was flying over Kuwait at the time.
The friendly-fire episode occurred at a time when Kuwaiti forces were on edge. A day before the shootdown of the F-15s, on March 1, six US Army soldiers were killed by an Iranian drone attack on a US tactical operations centre at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait.
An ex-Air Force fighter pilot told Air & Space Forces Magazine the incident is “perplexing,” given that allied pilots are trained to follow procedures to prevent such dangerous mistakes.
“If you’re flying air defense missions, the first thing you do is interrogate using your transponder,” the former pilot told the magazine. American pilots, he said, broadcast an Identification Friend or Foe code that identifies them as friendly to allied forces.
It is not clear if the Kuwati F/A-18 planes had their IFF systems on.
“It’s pretty hard to mistake an F-15E for an Iranian aircraft, and particularly if they’re not maneuvering in any kind of aggressive fashion,” the former pilot told the magazine.
Even if the F-15s were flying without transponders turned on, “that’s not a basis to engage those aircraft,” the former pilot said.
“They have to be demonstrating some hostile intent. If they’re just flying, that’s not hostile intent,” he added.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Dan Caine acknowledged the “loss” of the three F-15Es in a press briefing at the Pentagon on March 2 and said the US knew the incident “was not from hostile enemy fire.” He declined to comment any further.
CENTCOM commander Adm Brad Cooper said March 3 that 200 fighters have participated in the operation, conducting 2,000 strikes. F-15Es are among the aircraft participating in the mission.
Kuwait’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement that it “confronted a number of hostile aerial targets” around dawn on the day of the shootdown, before adding a later statement that several US aircraft crashed.
F/A-18 Hornet IFF Transponder
The F/A-18 Hornet uses an advanced Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system, such as the BAE Systems AN/DPX-7, to identify aircraft and prevent friendly fire. It features Mark XIIA/Mode 5/S and ADS-B capabilities, with controls on the Up-Front Controller (UFC) for modes like 4, and integrates with the radar to display targets as friendly (green), hostile (red), or unknown (yellow) on the Situation Awareness (SA) page.
The system must be activated via the UFC, specifically using the IFF button, to begin responding to interrogations for support military Mode 4/5 for secure identification, as well as Mode S and ADS-B for civil air traffic control.
The APG-73 attack radar can perform Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR) to identify targets even if they do not respond to standard IFF. The IFF was turned on, F-15 fighter jets should have shown Green (friendly) in the cockpit, not Red (Chevron): Hostile. Even Yellow (Square): Unknown should have given the Kuwaiti pilot the opportunity to interrogate the IFF transponder for friend-or-foe.
Fence In Or Fence Out?
A former U.S. Air Force pilot, Venable said in a phone call that “fog and fiction” were certainly factors. That could have led to mistakes made on the ground, and perhaps even by the aviators. However, combat aircraft are equipped with technology that identifies them as friendly when not operating in hostile airspace.
“When you go into a combat zone, you turn off the emitter,” said Venable, referring to the Mode 3/C transporter, the standard, non-secure identification friend or foe transponder used by combat aircraft for identification and altitude reporting.
“It remains on when you’re not trying to be clandestine,” added Venable.
The biggest question is whether the three Strike Eagles were fenced in or fenced out? Fencing in means the aircraft is ready for battle and is entering enemy airspace. Fencing out is used for aircraft heading home.
Yet, if the aircraft were fenced in, they could still be identified by friendly air defenses. The Strike Eagles are outfitted with the Mode 4 transponder, a secure, encrypted military IFF system that is used to distinguish friendly aircraft from threats. Mode 4 requires both the interrogator and transponder to use synchronized cryptographic keys to decode challenges.
The same would have been true with the F/A-18 Super Hornet in December 2024.
“The repeat of these incidents under similar circumstances speaks to the issues at play,” said James Marques, senior aerospace, defense & security analyst at Global Data.
Of course, all the systems need to be talking to one another, and this is where it may have gotten complicated.
According to international analytics firm Global Data, Kuwait’s air defense systems include the U.S.-made Patriot PAC-2/PAC-3; the U.S. MIM-23 Hawk dating to the Cold War; the Spada 2000, developed by the European consortium MBDA Missile Systems; and the Swiss Skyshield 35 short-range defense platform.
Marques explained in an email that this latest friendly fire incident occurred when mixing friendly aircraft with ground and sea-based capabilities, in response to a combined missile and drone threat. He further noted similar mishaps further in the past, including when a U.S. and British fighter jet were both downed by friendly fire from Patriots in separate incidents during the 2003 Iraq war.
“In all cases, the shoot-downs occurred in very ‘dense’ environments, where coordination with a range of multinational forces air, land, and sea coincides with the need to counter threats of different shapes, speeds, and sizes,” added Marques.
It could have been a case of communication overload, with a barrage of radio transmissions, electronic warfare, and rapidly changing plans.
“The datalinking, comms, and computer systems we use to coordinate forces remain more complex and tangled than you might imagine by today’s standards,” said Marques. “The room for error is minuscule, and in the Middle East, we are triangulating between the training, technique, and procedure of several different nations, even for the same system such as Patriot.”
At present, we still don’t know which system hit the F-15, but the mix of technologies only increases the risk that one failed to identify the aircraft as friendly correctly.
“It is possible an earlier radar design and a newer one had conflicting ID’s for the F15s, or a newer one was going off bad data supplied by an older one,” Marques added.
Mistakes Do Happen, And They Can Be Deadly
The next important question is whether the aircraft was outbound or inbound. If it were on departure, Venable said the situation really “stinks” because the aircraft would have been climbing away from the weapon systems and wouldn’t have crossed into enemy lines, where they would have been fenced in with the emitters shut off.
“If it is on departure, everyone should know it is a friendly aircraft,” said Venable, who noted that there are times when jets are coming out of a combat zone and have to “fence out” and turn on the transponders.
“It is a very busy time, and pilots can forget,” Venable added. “But that never happens in a two-seater like the F-15E Strike Eagle, where the back seater – the weapons systems operator – is responsible for that task.”
It would be nearly impossible that three Strike Eagles were flying back to the nest and didn’t have any of their transponders on.
“The idea that those aircraft weren’t squawking was very unlikely,” Venable continued.
Yet even with today’s safeguards, several factors can lead to mishaps. Operation Epic Fury is both fairly epic in scale and involves a multitude of nations.
“It is important to keep in mind that any air battle past a certain scale is almost guaranteed to see friendly fire incidents; it is a fog-of-war inevitability,” said Marques. “Even with modern technology, air warfare and air defense demand a lot of pilots and crews who are working to different priorities and incentives, seeing the fight unfold from two entirely different perspectives.”
This includes all “intangible” factors, such as the sense of safety and “relaxation” a pilot may feel over friendly skies versus the present danger a missile crew still sees below. The technology also isn’t infallible.
“Advanced technology such as the IFF transponder is meant to provide an ‘ID’ on the electromagnetic spectrum, marking a plane as friendly, yet those systems have failed before, and there are several tactical reasons both friendly or enemy aircraft may have them switched off, which has itself led to ugly episodes in the past,” Marques continues.
Then there is the human element on the ground.
That could include what Venable described as an “insider threat,” meaning that a Kuwaiti may have had pro-Iranian or anti-American beliefs.
“Shooting down three American aircraft would be a big day, and that individual could go to the next life and get his reward,” Venable suggested. “Or an operator just got nervous. You could have a junior person put on the console without the necessary training or experience. How this happened runs a whole gamut of possibilities.”
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